Diplomatic envoy turns tutor at Abu Dhabi academy

Abu Dhabi, UAE: In Abu Dhabi’s downtown Al Markaziyah district, a few hundred metres separate the British embassy from the headquarters of the Emirates Diplomatic Academy and the life Tom Fletcher used to lead. Mr Fletcher’s business card reveals that he is a former British ambassador, but not that he was the youngest in the history of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), a record set in 2011 when, at the age of 36, he was posted to Beirut. Nor does it tell of the four years he served in Downing Street when he worked as a foreign policy adviser to three British prime ministers, including Gordon Brown, who describe Mr Fletcher as a "diplomatic genius". What Mr Fletcher’s business card reveals, however, are the three letters that follow his name: CMG. They refer to the honour he was given for his work – he became a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George – a time-honoured and peculiarly British award that wags in Whitehall refer to as "call me god". Notwithstanding the honour, Mr Fletcher’s days in the Foreign Office came to an end after Beirut. As he now sits in his bright, new office at the Emirates Diplomatic Academy (EDA), his immediate focus is not on the 12 bodyguards and 200 embassy staff he had in Lebanon, but the students he teaches at the academy and those who are about to graduate. When we meet, the corridors surrounding Mr Fletcher’s office at the EDA are busy with builders, camera crews and cleaners, preparing the academy for the graduation ceremony of its first cohort of students, which is taking place today. Mr Fletcher joined the EDA in August this year as senior adviser to its director general, the Spanish diplomat Bernardino Leon, and one of his key tasks since then has been to advise on its curriculum. "They’ve asked me to give some advice on how to develop 21st century skills. How do diplomats learn the right courage, resilience, curiosity, which have always been diplomatic characteristics, but to apply those in the internet age," the 41-year-old says. "How do you use a smartphone to do better diplomacy and what do big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence mean for its future?" he asks rhetorically, neatly encapsulating the subject of his recent book, Naked Diplomacy – Power and Statecraft in the Digital Age. Mr Fletcher’s ideas about the impact of technology on diplomacy developed from his experience of having to deal with a round-the-clock news agenda while he was in Downing Street and as ambassador in Lebanon, when he posted more than 10,000 tweets, something that led Stephen Sackur, presenter of the BBC’s Hardtalk programme, to describe him as the Kim Kardashian of diplomacy. "In Lebanon, I was often very restricted where I could go physically and to whom I could speak to for security reasons. But I had more information at my fingertips than any previous British ambassador had ever had in real time," Mr Fletcher says. "So, at moments when a bomb went off you’d really think about the messages you should get out at that point to try and reduce the potential for violence or retaliation. It’s classic diplomacy but with social media it has rocket boosters on." Mr Fletcher describes how his use of his mobile phone and social media gradually changed in Lebanon, from being merely a means of finding things out to becoming a platform for reaching out to people and eventually becoming a platform upon which longer, thematic diplomatic campaigns could be built. "It doesn’t seem so odd now to think of an ambassador tweeting and interacting with people, but five or six years ago it was much more of a novelty and there was a shock value that I was replying to people, even if they were saying nasty things," he says. © The National

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